Now Turkey is Headed to Islamic Fundamentalism

Let’s face it, Egypt is on a downward spiral. Since so-called 'democracy' protests forced out the secular, pro-American president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011 the nation has been run by a military government. But Muslims, many of them radical, are increasing their power greatly through free elections.

Egyptians have become fearful and are buying guns, inflation has soared, the economy has deteriorated, garbage is piling up in the streets of Cairo and militant Muslims have been intimidating the nation’s 8 million Coptic Christians or about 10% of the population.

Mubarak himself has been put on trial and the New York Times reported in Autumn 2011 that:

‘…tens of thousands of Egyptians poured into Tahrir Square… for a day that had been billed as one of unified protest against the interim military government. But the turnout was lopsided, dominated by members of religious movements, ranging from the most conservative, the Salafists, to the relatively moderate Muslim Brotherhood.’

The ‘moderate’ Muslim Brotherhood? No way are they ‘moderate’. But this is the way that the American Media Left are portraying this group which Mubarak wisely kept at bay for 30 years during his rule.

And the Salafists are not just ‘conservative’ but many are extreme like many others in Egypt who want sharia law instituted and who favor a strict Iran-like government which Egypt is on the road to getting.

It is amazing how the American media are covering up the truth about the changes currently roiling the Middle East.

During Mubarak’s rule Egypt was stable, was open to tourism, had peace with Israel and got US military aid. Today that stability is fading into memory.

The Times also is reporting that secularists in Egypt who protested Mubarak now are alarmed at the strongly fundamentalist tone of the new protests and of the elections in Egypt since the fall of Mubarak.

Oh, big surprise. The day that it looked as if Mubarak was going to be forced out – which came quickly after the protests started – we American conservatives warned that it was the beginning of the end for Egypt, that the nation was going to be taken over by the Muslim Brotherhood some of whose factions have vowed to topple all pro-American governments in the Middle East and create an Islamic caliphate.

Meanwhile a fundamentalist wave continues to surge through other parts of the region. In Turkey, long considered a secular, moderate, pro-Western Islamic state that even is a member of NATO, the chief of the armed forces Isik Kosaner resigned in 2010 along with the heads of the army, navy and air force. They were angry about the arrest of senior officers accused of plotting against the increasingly Islamist government.

This was a result of long-term tensions between the secular military and the governing Muslim-friendly AK party over the last few years. In 1997 the army even forced the resignation of Turkey’s first Islamic government.

Today Turkey appears to be veering toward a fundamentalist regime much like Iran. According to Robert F. Pollock writing in the June 3, 2010Wall Street Journal, Turkey has changed dramatically in recent years, becoming increasingly dominated by two extremist forces – Islam in the government and hard leftists in the media. In sum, anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Western and anti-Israel. Wrote Pollock about the people in Turkey today:

‘What information most of them get is filtered through a secular press that makes Italian communists look right wing by comparison… (in) an increasing number of state influenced outfits… Topics A and B have been the malign influence on the world of Israel and the United States… Turks were fed a steady diet of imagined atrocities perpetrated by US forces in Iraq, often with the implication that they were acting as muscle for the Jews… The newspaper Yeni Safak, prime minister Tayyip Erdogan’s daily read, claimed that Americans were tossing so many Iraqi bodies into the Euphrates that local mullahs had issued a fatwa ordering residents not to eat the fish.’

‘The same paper repeatedly claimed that the US used chemical weapons in Fallujah. And it reported that Israeli soldiers had been deployed alongside US forces in Iraq and that US forces were harvesting the innards of dead Iraqis for sale on the US “organ market”.’

The Pollock commentary featured a photograph of Erdogan shaking hands with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, obviously setting the tone for the whole nation.

Islam-watch.org reports:

‘…Erdogan and his Islamist AKP party have been moving closer to a fundamentalist position by purging the Military of its secular leaders and stacking the courts with Islamists. The second fall of Constantinople (Istanbul) will be peaceful, and is almost complete.’

Thus now Islam appears to be undermining two of the nations that formerly were the most stable, moderate and pro-Western states in the Middle East – Turkey and Egypt.

And don’t think that the strange bedfellows of communists and Islamists are not working hand-in-hand to undermine governments all over the Middle East. Because it gives them a chance to rid the Middle East of American, Christian, Western and Israeli influence, which both the left and the Islamists oppose.

The ultimate victor – either communists or Islamists – will be decided by events on the ground, which was the case in Iran in 1979. Muslims, however, certainly appear to have the upper hand today as evidenced by demographic numbers, by reports that they have formed an alliance with some military leaders in Egypt and by the fact that they are increasingly influencing the government in Turkey.

And those two nations’ military leaders may see their best future in alliance with Islamists, rather than unemployed and in the streets if Islamists seize total power and turn against them. That is why both of these nations appear to be dark harbingers of things to come.